>>13999313it's so, so clear when an undergrad/high schooler spent a summer in a lab "helping"/"doing work" (aka, washing lab dishes and doing PCRs and oh, maybe even a western blot or 2!) and want to puff up their chests
I have a PhD in cell biology. Aging is not my field, it's neuron development, but the only people who think "the first immortal person has already been born" are people who have no idea how much we have to circumvent for immortality, how much we don't know still, not to mention the near-certainty that we will encounter new age-related diseases as people live longer and longer.
Almost with certainty, the first immortal person will actually be genetically engineered from birth. Anyone alive today has "aged" enough where the accumulated damage has been done (as far as we know, a lot of aging research suggests we can't reverse aging according to aging markers, but we can prevent it if anything). The modern brain is in no state for immortality. If you mention "what about telomeres just make them long lol", you don't know enough to comment on this topic. We have little studies on this, but so far transplanting "young" blood (actually, replacing hemopoietic stem cells with "newly born" hemopoietic stem cells) has no impact on lifespan.
The big breakthroughs for life span will almost certainly start with scaling up growing organs from patient-derived stem cells until it's the normal (no rejection, "unlimited" organs, possibly "younger" tissue). Beyond that, we have ages and ages to go until you genetically create the first potential immortal human. Knowing what I know about brain function, we will most likely have to engineer an entirely new brain structure (or some sort of brain-support system) to let it cope with such a lifespan, and it's infinitely easier as a species to just change it for the next generation.
Great promises are made to the elite so that funding continues. What are they gonna do, get angry at us after the die?
